Books: Jazz Hero

YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN—Dorothy Baker—Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

This first novel was inspired by the music but not by the life of Leon (Bix) Beiderbecke, a Davenport, Ia. boy who played the trumpet in Paul Whiteman's band, became one of the greatest of jazz musicians and died in 1931, leaving devotees of swing music to collect phonographic records of his art as reverently as art collectors gather the works of Old Masters. In Young Man with a Horn, the hero is called Rick Martin, and he is presented as a good-natured, hardworking, colorless individual,...